Chapter 224

It doesn’t matter who made you. It matters what you choose to be.”

I wrote this on the start of my 59th trip around the sun and the completion of my 58th trip around the sun, even though in the West we count this as me being 58 years old, I am really living out the first day of my 59th year. Josie and Earl got together about 58 years and nine months ago and made me. For good or bad, that defined me for decades, especially in the first 17 years of my life, and even quite a bit in the second 17 years of my life, but less and less so since then. As Brenda pointed out, we become something other along the way, especially and more pronouncedly if you can overcome the idea that who made you makes you.

The reality in the larger world is that, you can choose what and who you are, far more than ever before. And it can have far less to do with who made you than ever before. Of course these bonds can still have tremendous power. I have lost count of the number of people I have met in SE Asia who are willing to debase themselves in order to fulfill their cultural and social obligations to their parents and grandparents and great grandparents. They have decided that who made them supersedes every other choice that they can make. They are technically wrong about that, but their understanding of the world prevents them from ever finding this freedom to be. 

You don’t have these same cultural bonds. You may find them safe, but you don’t have to choose to have your present and future decided by those who made you. 

You are free.